I need it repeated...... for some reason I can't rest until I know what it was!

When asked in 1997 what he would do to fix Apple's problems, Michael Dell infamously told a crowd of IT executives, "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

As context, it was the week after a Steve Jobs keynote where he defended some drastic decisions (as interim CEO, no less) that included shutting down projects and even the Apple clone market in an effort to turn Apple around.

This graph is lumping mobile apps sales into the mobile phone profits as one.

It's not a good representative of the real data. Notice the drastic change from Q2 2008 to Q3 2008. Difference in categorization in the accounting books.

Different thread, same idiocy. iPhone 3G launch was huge, App profits are not included in this graph, and even if they were they are tiny compared to hardware. Guess you're just sad because samsung don't get to do any app sales.

I have to believe that this kind of dominance -- even though utterly wrongly -- will start to attract antitrust scrutiny. Competitors are going to start to moan and groan about Apple using its high-volume supply chain to keep industry prices low, and there'll be some genius at the DoJ that springs a new doctrine of "supply chain efficiency as a weapon of market power". Wait and see. \

The funny things is, how often could you actually upgrade? I remember when I wanted to upgrade back in my PC days in the 90's that more often than not I pretty much couldn't. A new processor would mean a new motherboard. A new motherboard would need new memory and probably there had been a change in the video card interface. In the end, whenever I upgraded all I ended up with was the same beige box with a completely different computer in it!

To true, which is why I stopped building my own Windows PC's and switched to Mac. The most upgrading I accomplished on my PC's was one or two upgrades of the video card before I had to replace everything in that giant box.

Gone are the days when the top PC was a big set top box that you could assemble yourself from components you bought at Fry's for a third of what Apple was charging for its cheapest Mac.

Now Apple can buy the RAM, screens, and other key components for less that we pay at Fry's, and less than what its competitors can pay anywhere in the world.

What a difference a decade makes.

EDIT: Also gone are the days when you could upgrade. Hello to the era of lovely products that you use for three years and then get rid of!

Gone is the era of a big chunky hot noisy box taking up a massive amount of space on your desk that crashes and can't play the latest games even if you've upgraded it and over clocked because of all the absolutely lousy console to PC porting and hideously diabolical DRM and useless online services like Games From Windows Live Sucks and idiotic big-name game publishers forcing you to use Securom and other nonsense so you have to have the disc inside the computer at all times while playing (what next, a custom USB DRM dongle? I wouldn't be surprised).

As for 3 years, ironically PS3 and XBox360 have some pretty dated graphics now but have been kicking around for, what, five years? With at least a few more years to go. But once I travel to another city at the start of September Xbox360 will be my only choice for chill out gaming. Or maybe my iPad2 will tide me over a bit. Why hasn't Microsoft come out with Xbox720 or something? Another company sitting on their behinds. Xbox seems invincible now but an A6-powered AppleTV could take a nice bite out of their lunch. PS3 is still surviving because it's probably dumping loads of cash on developers for PS3 exclusives but again, once iOS hits the gaming console...

There real question is why is Intel, an Apple supplier and partner, helping Apple's competition compete with Apple. Perhaps, Intel is worried the rumors of Apple moving the AirBooks to the ARM processor are true. Otherwise, Intel has no business assisting some partners at the expense of others.

It does seem odd. What do these "design guidelines" entail, I wonder? Since Apple is already using Intel parts in the Air, and since apparently the design ends up costing as least as much as the Air, is this a case of Intel reverse engineering Apples motherboard design, in the hopes that if they encourage same among other manufacturers it will help stave off the non-Intel tablet boom?

I mean, the Air is precisely what this Intel reference design purports to be-- does Intel feel they have to act as tutor to the less bright students?

They spoke of the sayings and doings of their commander, the grand duke, and told stories of his kindness and irascibility.

I remember when the market was generally bemoaning (or simply criticizing) Apple's lack of a "net book" class machine some even going so far as to say that net books were going to be the demise of Apple how could they compete with "perfectly capable, small, inexpensive computers" that were only going to get faster, smaller, cheaper?

By redefining the market, maybe?

The one-two punch of iPad and MacBook Air. neither is purely a "laptop" of 5 years ago, nor is either really a "net book" and yet, pretty much everything you want or need to do with your mobile 'computing device' is covered

I remember one time that Jobs snarked about net books saying essentially they're cheap, crappy, underpowered pieces of plastic that often don't last a year mentioned something in passing about "doing it right"

Windows popularity appears to be on the decline. Unless you need it for compatibility with your office there is no logical reason to choose Windows in my opinion. Also it seems that students are overwhelmingly choosing Mac, at least judging by the number of Apple logos I see around Southern California.

Apparently you aren't aware. Windows 7 is the best selling OS ever created with 400+ million licenses sold so far. That's just for Windows 7. Unless I'm mistaken Windows 7 has roughly twice the market share of all recent versions of OSX combined. And that's not including Windows Vista and Windows XP which make up the other 50 percent of the world wide OS market. You could argue that XP and Vista are not popular.

Come on. No one can suggest that Apple is competing on the bottom end of the market. These guys can squash Apple on price any day of the week. Apple is expensive, but if you want quality they are the place to go. To suggest that Asus or HP can't compete is ludicrous.

I have to believe that this kind of dominance -- even though utterly wrongly -- will start to attract antitrust scrutiny. Competitors are going to start to moan and groan about Apple using its high-volume supply chain to keep industry prices low, and there'll be some genius at the DoJ that springs a new doctrine of "supply chain efficiency as a weapon of market power". Wait and see. \

If you've considered this angle, I'm pretty sure an executive in a business suit getting paid big bucks has probably already though of it. They're not making big bucks for nothing. I'm willing to bet that someone has already given a complaint to the government. I'm also willing to bet that the investigation didn't go anywhere.

If Apple were buying up components solely with intent to block out competitors and/or drive up prices for them, that would be price manipulation and that would certainly attract antitrust scrutiny. But there is no evidence of that at all.

Apple has faced supply constraints in the past, which put pressure on their sales. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have enough components on hand to avoid supply constraints. From Apple's perspective, they want to avoid a backlog like that of the iPad 2 or the iPhone 4. Driving up prices for competitors is probably a welcome side effect for Apple but that's certainly not the only purpose.

The funny thing is that if competitors really are "moaning and groaning" about antitrust, they're being so hypocritical. When Apple defends their patents in court, competitors say that Apple would "litigate rather than innovate." Now here they are, crying foul over perfectly legal practices, rather than doing something about it. Of course, no one will see it that way, because no one gives Goliath a fair shake.